PowerShell is clearly the way forward at Microsoft, particularly as more workloads are moved to the Azure cloud. Learning the language of POSH, as it's colloquially become known, is definitely one of the best investments in time an administrator can make. It always amazes me how powerful and consistent this language is compared to the multitude of obscure and non-standard tools of the past.

A great example is replacements for our old friends ping, tracert, ipconfig and the like.